Hi everyone,

I am looking at starting a small coffee shop and roaster in my local town. The roasters I have been looking at are the Diedrich 3kg, Has Garanti 3kg and the Toper 3kg. The Has Garanti seems to be the cheapest, then the Toper, and then the Diedrich.

Has anyone used a Toper. I can pretty much guess that the Diedrich is the better one. But do you think I can achieve the same results on a Toper?

Any help is much appreciated.

P.s. HB sometimes seems like a book club for us caffeine junkies we come here and moan about our problems and get advice, its great:)

I have the Diedrich IR-1 and looked at the Toper Cafemino 1kg roaster as well. There are a few here with the Cafemino on HB and one of the things they mention is that machine has no control over the gas pressure to adjust the heat, however there is a post or two about adding this control. I have no idea if this is the same with the larger capacity Toper's. I did not look into the Has Garanti.

I thought hard about the IR-2.5 but in the end decided it was not a Large enough batch size to use for business, IMO a 5kg roaster is the smallest I would want for a roasting operation. If I do go into business then my IR-1 will be used for profiling paired with an IR-12. The IR-2.5 will roast 7.1kg per hour and there will be a 15-20% loss of weight after roast plus that is working like a machine to produce these numbers per hour leaving bagging and other things that need to be done to run the business for later in the day or for someone else to do. To me this is a lot of roasting for very little profit margin. A 5kg Diedrich will produce a max of 13.3kg per hour and free more time up for a one person operation to put time into the rest of the business. Also consider that both a 2.5kg and the 5kg machine have the same minimum batch size of 454g so if things go well you have room to roast more beans with out putting in more hours per day.

You may also want to look into US Roasting Corp http://www.usroastercorp.com/5kiloroaster.htm
They have very affordable (compared to Diedrich) automated controllers to free time up for other parts of the business.